


Rabbit Hole

by kalima



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Disabled Character, F/M, Paranoia, Red Angel, Sex is Weird, time is slippery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:22:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25092304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalima/pseuds/kalima
Summary: Before Spock falls into the river of Time, he slips and slides inexorably towards it.
Kudos: 14





	Rabbit Hole

Spock went first to Shi’Kahr, to his home and the calm, unassailable love of his mother. He did not know if he would ever see her again after this.

He sat with her in the garden. She held his hand between both of hers. She knew he was troubled. She always knew. He gave her a possible reason.

“It could be a perfectly normal malaise after years spent on a ship in the outer reaches of space unable to return home because of a war.” Which, when spoken aloud, seemed both ridiculous and perfectly reasonable. Not the reason, but she did not press, as he knew she would not.

He looked for clues in the room of his childhood, in all the miscellany mothers kept as reminders of people who did not exist anymore. He meditated poorly, slept too long, dreamt too much. Bursts of energy, bright red, folded into origami blossoms. The most disturbing dream was of the angel hovering above his bed, watching it drift down to lay atop him, wings spread, forehead to forehead, as he slowly ignited and burst into flames. _This_ was what he was being guided towards. His own destruction or the destruction of literally _everything,_ all creation, all of existence.

Of course, thoughts like that were also signs of psychosis. 

He stayed one day and half of another, causing his mother sadness, but he had to leave before his father returned so it could not be helped. 

The plan he made involved misdirection, of course, sparked by paranoia regarding Section 31.

Paranoia, another sign of psychosis.

He went to Rigel IV, planning to lease a long-range shuttle, and go where directed by the angel or his own careful determinations based on evidence. Or his psychosis. 

Instead he took that shuttle to the city of Tlaxcalal, on the southern peninsula of the only large continent on the planet. Population four million, diverse both in species and culture, loud, messy, colorful, distracting. A constant thrum to keep a demon at bay.

In the center of the city, from whence all roads spiraled out, he found a room, dropped his rucksack on the bed and went walking instead.

***

By day, Tlaxcalal feels like an ever-evolving art installation dotted with bistros. The late afternoon sun is crisp-bright, but the air is sultry, and city dwellers are dressed for heat. Flesh dark or golden tanned, pearly opalescent, pale blue, or green or red, scales glinting, fur shaved close to the skin, in the least amount of clothing required by city ordinance, or the most billowing gauze for the breeze coming off the bay. 

He buys fruit from a stand in an open-air market. It is a drupe of some kind, bright yellow. The vendor washes it for him, and he eats it sitting by a fountain. It tastes like a slightly sweet juicy olive. Others rinse their hands in the spray of fountain water, so he does as well, wipes his mouth with a damp palm, drags his sleeve across to dry it and then moves on. He has never done anything like this before. Wander alone, in a strange place, with no plan, no itinerary.

He walks until the sun sets, past shops closing and different ones opening. Restaurants, diners, bars. Literal hole-in-the-wall theaters. Lofts with art galleries, art studios, fortune tellers, gaming arcades, and tearooms with _ghawazee_ dancers practicing shimmies and hips rolls. Past stacks of flats with skinny balconies, too many people on them, and all the people holding a bottle or a glass or a tool for sublimating stimulants, all of them arguing, laughing as music drifted out the windows and mingled with the vapor clouds around their heads.

Farther on, music clubs, night clubs, dance clubs, all specific to a type of interest or entertainment. A heavy blackwood door opens onto a wall of sound and color and smoke, the sweat of mingled species, strobing lights, and the rattling-pounding of hundreds of feet. A boy pulls him in, into a waving field of bodies all throbbing in time to the beat of one gigantic heart, a quickening boom boom boom boom. Each boom rattles his teeth in his skull. He cannot think, no thinking, no thoughts, no visions, his mind, and every mind poised together in blank anticipation–

The beat drops.

He slides into the all, slips into the nothing.

***

Spock thought she was Vulcan. She looked Vulcan, except her hair was unkempt and he couldn’t hear her mind and she was on top of him so he should. Perhaps she’d been medically altered to look Vulcan. He’d heard there were sex workers who did that. Though, if asked, they were legally required to disclose such alterations prior to the transactions. He imagined clients rarely asked.

Was she a sex worker? Had he just spent the night with a sex worker? He could feel her, skin to skin, her thighs on either side of his prone body, the cushion of cool air between them, but her mind offered less even than humans. Not quite blank, but no emotions darting about like tiny fish near the surface of a pond. Then he realized—

“You are deaf,” Spock said in Vulcan.

“You are bad at sex,” she said in Standard.

“Probably.” He closed his eyes. “Forgive me. I was rude. I seem to have no filters.” Disturbing enough in and of itself. She was mind-deaf. Psi-deaf. And he had not used the clinical term for it but rather a derogatory one. Unforgivable.

“It is a good thing you are pretty.”

“Get off him, Alieth,” said a person to his left. His head ached and his ears were ringing so he didn’t turn to look. Peripherally, a biped in high boots and a short skirt.

“She has no idea if you’re good or bad at sex,” the booted biped assured him. The voice could have been male or female. Or neither. Or both. “I wouldn’t allow you to be taken advantage, lovie. You couldn’t give consent.”

“Thank you.”

“But you were very off your brain, my brother,” the Vulcan Alieth said, patting his chest. “I am _pas-kae_ but not so stupid as you last night.” She rolled her hips.

“Here, get off him now. You’re being cruel.”

Alieth twisted sideways, one knee dragged across his stomach as she moved her body _very_ slowly to the left, an ankle bone, the arch of her foot, her toes. She landed on the floor with a purposeful thud. Spock tried to grab the sheet before it went after her but was too late. He fell back onto the bed and stared through the windows in the ceiling slope. A pale violet sky, clouds like pearls sliding off a string. The inside of his mouth felt dry and gluey at the same time.

He was certain there were two others in the large room besides Alieth and the booted biped who had rescued him from her. If he engaged with anyone else, he would have to acknowledge his circumstances. Or at least discover what those were. He felt the panic rising – _I have gone mad. That is done, then._ Still, he could not lie here naked forever.

The biped short skirt picked up the sheet from the floor and threw it over him. “Candy.”

“No, thank you,” he said, tucking the sheet around him as he sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed.

“That’s my name, dear.”

“Spock. Is my name.”

A chorus of hellos.

“Are my clothes available?”

A human male sitting on a high counter next to a sink, pointed at the laundry fresher, green-light indicator showing it was busy freshening something. His clothes. “You were lucky I was watching out. Sometimes tourists get busted up real bad. And they were going to roll you for sure.”

It was the same boy who took his arm and drew him into the club. He saw now, this was not a boy too young to be in a club, but likely a man with Juventas Syndrome.

“Why were you watching out?” Spock asked, his voice raspy. “I do not know you.”

“You were lost. Why? You wanted to be robbed or raped?”

No.

“Ah. You wished to be lost.”

“How long until my clothes are fresh?”

The boy glanced at the timer. “Two minutes. I’m Guillermo.”

The fourth person in the group stepped out from curtained off area where he assumed the hygiene facilities were located. Andorian, one of the two female genders.

“I am Zoli. You may use the binary pronoun she.”

He bowed his head in acknowledgement of yet another species making it easy for others to be lazy.

Alieth slid a dress over her head, patterned with flashy red flowers that resembled the asters in his mother’s garden. She might not have bothered considering the transparency of the fabric.

Small in stature for a Vulcan – one point six two meters at most. Her head slightly too large for her body, an effect enhanced by the teased and tangled mess of her hair. Small stature and overlarge head were common malformities in people with her genetic defect. Her facial features, the sharp chin, the wide-set eyes, those were what humans called fey. A small mythical creature, pretty and notoriously rude.

Everything about Alieth’s demeaner was rude by Vulcan standards. Behavior likely indulged and tolerated at home. He could imagine the figurative pats on the head because she managed to form coherent sentences or hold down a job, even though cognitive and intellectual abilities were in no way affected by her condition. He and his sister had been held to higher standards, despite constant reminders of their condition, that condition being human and half so.

Staring was rude.

He glanced at the other person in the quartet, Candy, and noted for the first time the black-on-black eyes and serene sympathetic attention common to Betazoids.

Immediately, his mind scrambled to find any cracks in his mental shields where the jumble of scarlet disorder of light equations burst out of this red form fractal of equal to folding into chaos folding into melting of melting red geometric folding crimson origami of coordinates into falling into falling into the red black nonsense poetics up child scribble scribble angel angel angel angel of madness of feathers of red light bursting that might have leaked out somehow—

“Oh, my poor wee, love,” Candy whispered, hand to throat in horrified empathy. “You’re a right mess in there.”

A soft little ping. “Laundry’s done,” Guillermo said.

***

He decides Candy’s pronouns are they/their/them. Mostly because his observational ability is not up to parsing gender signifiers.

They are older than his mother. Closer to his maternal grandmother’s age, who, though quite Earth fashionable, would never wear over-the-knee boots and a skirt that short. Or a wig that shade of purple. Or, indeed, a wig at all.

Dressed again his freshened clothes from the previous day, he sits on a faded blue velvet sofa, with nap so worn in places it could barely be called velvet anymore. He has a cup of tea he cannot quite manage to drink. Candy is at the other end of the sofa, looking calm and comfortable, one leg drawn up, elbow on the arm rest, purple bewigged head in hand. He cannot tell if the eyelashes casting those centipede shadows on the flesh over orbital bones are false or permanent attachments. It is unsettling. He looks away.

“Auditory hallucinations?” they ask.

“Sometimes. Not voices. Or perhaps voices though I cannot make out words. There is often an electric buzz, as if persons on either side of me are humming 60 hertz alternating current frequencies directly into my ears.”

They shudder at the very idea.

“But after…” He hesitates. Because the buzzing sound is always followed by a kind of tonotopic afterimage, thrilling, verging on erotic, the quietened sound of wings beating the air heralding the appearance of –

“The red demon,” Candy says.

This makes him physically cringe. Everything about these hallucinations is cringe-worthy, distasteful, humiliating. He forces himself to swallow a sip of tea. A vaguely bitter concoction supposed to be calming.

Guillermo and Zoli have already left. Alieth is getting ready to do the same, hairpins held between her teeth as she twists her hair into horn shapes on the top of her head. She has employment as a server in a vegan restaurant close by. He keeps waiting for her to put on undergarments beneath the dress because it is so sheer. Perhaps he should not be watching. He pulls his gaze away.

“A red angel,” he corrects. “I need it to tell me what to do, where to go. Where to find it. Logic avails me nothing. Equations keep changing. The numbers and letters do not stay still. Are they coordinates? Time signatures? Mere theoretical assertions? Everything is like a sponge filled with water that is also made of water.”

Alieth picks up a tube of stretchy fabric from a bench next to the main door and pulls it on under the dress. Covered midthigh to breastbone, she says, “When you are hungry you can come to my place of employment if you like. They serve muteku, and good buhnthas.” She leaves without telling him where it is.

Candy of the caterpillar eyelashes leans forward with something to say. A too compassionate demeaner confirms how far down Alice’s rabbit hole he has fallen.

“It’s all right, love. You’re not a lost cause yet. You’re just lost. You’ve had these spells most of your life, yeah? And now, for some reason, they’re shouting at you. They require attention. Professional attention, my love, to help you see what they are trying to say. There’s no shame in it.” 

“You are not Vulcan.” 

Candy reaches over to pat his knee. He tries not to twitch. “I’ve got to be leaving soon myself. Please consider my advice. Oh, and the restaurant is ‘Drum Hat Buddha’ north on Xenoteca Drive. Not far. You’ll run right into it.”

He thanks her. After some waffling, he finds the restaurant, eats muteku (grain in the palm) and buhnthas (milk coins), served to him by a Vulcan woman with messy hair he had met while astride him earlier in the afternoon.

When she is finished with her shift, Alieth is his pilot, he goes where she tells him. They meet up with Guillermo and Zoli and then into a bar, where more of their friends await to talk about people he does not know. They ask questions of him, not about his occupation but about his hobbies, his entertainments, art, music, holovid shows and favorite authors. He says, yes, I have seen that, read that, followed the news feeds, have heard of that band/artist/singer. It is simply easier that way. Guillermo still follows Brazilian football. Zoli takes a dance class twice a week with the _ghawazee_ troupe he’d seen in the tearoom. Alieth only enjoys two things. Her friends laugh. She does not say what those things are.

He watches them drink. This is not a new experience for him. He has sat in a bar not drinking while crewmates imbibed a variety of substances ostensibly to “unwind.” But only long enough (fifty minutes) to fulfil his captain’s request that he “try.”

He orders a beer as it has more nutritional benefits than hard liquors. He cannot become inebriated from it and neither can Alieth. Unless her genetic disorder altered her metabolism? But after observing her over the course of the evening it is likely she drinks for social reasons. Because she enjoys the company. 

They visit a jazz club. More drinking. Then an open mic for poets where one of the poets is good. Now Zoli and Guillermo want to go to a different club for singing. He knows what that means—

“I will return to my hotel room. Please extend my thanks and my appreciation to your friends.”

“You draw the line at karaoke.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll walk with you to your hotel room.”

“It is not necessary—”

“Hello, the couple!” she says, waving. Guillermo and Zoli, emerging from the long hallway where the toilets are housed, trot over like eager pups. “Our new friend is tired. You two go on. I will see him home.”

There is a brief exchange of knowing looks he is not supposed to see. 

***

Nothing he read in the literature from either of his cultural backgrounds could have prepared him for the physical sensation of having part of his body inside part of another person’s body.

Not the clinical cautionary tales Vulcan adults gave to Vulcan adolescents, nor the secrets the Old Families clung to with fervent adherence and archaic rituals verging on child abuse. The strange, often ludicrous erotica of Humans who could sexualize virtually _anything_ , and their conflicted romanticizing of Human reproduction that caused so much anguish in them. None of that explained this.

This was flesh moving inside flesh designed specifically for the purpose. Corpus cavernosum, his external, hers internal, fluid and friction, engorged spongy structures rubbing together, hers sucking him in deep so that contracting muscles would signal the gathering force of orgasm. All of this. All. This.

The sounds she made had driven his desire for more vocalization, to discover all the manners in which he could make her cry out. But he couldn’t _hear_ her. Her mind was a blank, as was his to hers. He could not be sure of truth, her expressions, her reactions, if he caused genuine pain or merely the simulation of pain for the purpose of pleasure. And the freedom he experienced because of that was exhilarating. It would haunt him later. 

They repeated the activity in various positions three more times until midday. With breaks for hydration. 

***

“Every Vulcan knows about you, Spock. Are you disappointed I did not acknowledge it?”

“You could have looked down your nose at me, so that it was obvious.”

She smiled. “For which disgrace? Your mother or your vocation?”

He sat up straighter, propped a pillow against the headrest and leaned back to stretch his legs and flex his toes. “I believe they blend together neatly into a single reason to disparage me.”

“No one is _supposed t_ o disparage me.”

“Nor me, but that never stopped anyone intent upon doing so.”

“But I have an _affliction.”_ He could almost hear the quotation marks around the word. “Your humanity is not an affliction.”

“But it has been called a disability.”

“They took me out of the public education system when I was twelve. My only social interactions were with an at-home teaching sphere and my family.”

“I would have been grateful to be homeschooled.”

“Are we in competition?” She’d been sitting cross-legged on the bed and now scooted around to face him, a small furrow of irritation between her brows. She poked her finger into his ribcage. “I can assure you my experience was worse.”

“I was suspended for punching a classmate in the face.” At her expression, he hastened to add, “I am in no way proud of it.”

“Nor regretful. Your human side is close to the surface, friend.”

“ _Now_ , yes. But I am currently not—” He drew in a breath, dismissed what he’d been going to say. “You have distilled me down to essential elements. It took much more effort to drive me to extremes back then.” He was eleven at the time but had been hardened at six.

“Even so, I have done far worse.”

 _“’Though she be but little she is fierce.’_ ”

“You are quoting from a text unfamiliar to me, I suspect.”

“‘Tiny female is dangerous.’ But clearly I am not the one competing for who had the ultimate worst experience in youth.”

“Mine is the worst, Spock.”

“I cannot tell if you are being hyperbolic.” It distressed him. But he also liked it.

“Listen. When I was fourteen, I spent a lot of time alone – _stop,_ so did you, yes, yes. This is my story. There was a talus cave in some rock formations near my family’s home. I went there to escape, to play music I was not allowed to listen to and enjoy holovids I was not allowed to watch. One day I found three boys from the school taking refuge there. It was high sun. They had been doing a project for a class?” She cocked her head trying to recall, then shrugged. “I knew them. They had sometimes been unkind to me when I attended the school. But now they apologized for disturbing my sanctuary. Told me how pleasant it was. How comfortable I had made it. They were polite. They engaged with me. They were attentive. Too attentive, really. Mostly because of these.” She cupped her breasts. He swallowed a laugh.

He was struck then by where the story was inevitably headed. “They took advantage of you.”

‘Did they? Or did I step out of my clothes unasked? Did I say, you can touch me here? Or here? It won’t hurt because you can’t feel my mind.”

He closed his eyes. “Why? Why would you invite pain?”

“You _are_ too sensitive. Poor half-human boy.” She unfolded her legs, clambered over to straddle his lap. “You think they took advantage of my disability. They did not. They were trembling with the urge to touch me. I made them sit on their hands and watch.”

“Watch?”

“Close your eyes and imagine.” She rose to her knees and wriggled down around him until he was hard and seated inside her again. Her mouth was at his ear. “I held such power over them.”

He shuddered. The precursive electric hum starts where bodies are joined and moves up, cracks out the top of his head like lightning. 

She’s _here._

***

He sees where he must go. He is—

***

—eating take-away in a nest of ruined bedding.

She dips a funghi roll into a container of fiery sauce.

_Time is stuck to her fingers. She licks them and now Time is slippery again._

“ _That_ is the most interesting thing about you, I think.”

He’d told her about his adopted sister who’d gone to prison for mutiny. That was the most interesting thing about him. He tries to keep hold of the thread. “Do you have siblings?”

“My parents chose not to risk another. My aunt lived with us. She was the one who discovered us. In the cave. What we were doing. I should have stopped it but—”

Once started it could not be stopped.

_Why are you still there, Spock?_

Nothing could stop it.

_All this background noise is simply the bridge between verses. Boom Boom Boom Boom._

“—as I said, power. No one believed I could have consented or instigated because of my disability. As if I had no will to act. Father wanted them arrested. But it was all my doing.”

“It was not.”

“They were fourteen-year old boys.”

“And? Is that all?” he says. “ _That_ is your worst?”

She blinks at him. The hand with the funghi roll is poised halfway to her mouth. “I ruined their lives.”

“Did they ruin yours?”

“They could not. I had no future.”

He surges from the bed, his anger sudden and startling. “That is faulty reasoning! You are here _._ This present was your future then. If you are dissatisfied, alter your path. That is your _power_. Not all this—” He gesticulates wildly indicating the bed, the food cartons, her snarled and tangled hair, their unwashed bodies, the signs of his own dissolute behavior—“fucking and feeding.”

The look she returns is the most quintessential of Vulcan expressions. Polite non-reaction to the smell of something bad.

“I am not dissatisfied, Spock. I am remorseful. Perhaps you should meditate on your path rather than concern yourself with mine.” She proceeds to gather all the rubbish from the meal and deposit it into the reclamation slot. Clothes in hand, she heads to the ensuite. Even though the door operates on quiet pneumatic slides it seems very loud when it shuts in his face.

***

When Alieth emerged nearly an hour later, he was sitting at the desk provided, wearing the robe provided with his personal device linked to the hotel access terminal. He had smoothed the bedding over the evidence, but not too neatly so staff would know attention was needed but not how desperately. He would be gone by then.

She looked young in a way that made him melancholy, wistful. Hair hung smooth and sleek down the center of her back, the ends curling a little as it dried. He had not realized how much of her assertive personality might be attributed to “big hair” and bravado. She must have used the garment fresher in the ensuite because the bursts of red blossoms on her dress were bright. Everything about her looked bright. 

She gathered up all the little things she’d removed when they began – hairpins, earrings, bracelets and put them into the small bag she’d carried on their adventures in the city forty-two hours ago. Then she turned to him, shoulders squared, head up.

“I waver sometimes in my commitment to do no harm but endeavor always to show respect for all creation. I live _t'traih-ve_. If I have harmed you in some way, please tell me.”

“You have not.”

“I am also not concerned about the opinions of others as to how I live my life.”

“Nor should you be. I regret any offense I caused.”

“Then we part companionably.”

“Yes. Thank you for this experience, Alieth.”

Her too-wide eyes widen even more, followed by an expression of diffident acknowledgment and quiet delight.

“I took the liberty of arranging transport for you.” The delight disappeared. “For your safety!” he quickly amended. “The time of night can be dangerous, or so Guillermo told me. As I must depart soon, I am unable to escort you home.”

“May you benefit ardently from the present hour, Spock.” A strange farewell, and one that gave him far more hope than the traditional one. The traditional one was inappropriate here. But before he could think of another, she was already out the door.

He turned back to his travel arrangements using his father’s diplomatic bona fides to log a flight plan he had no intention of keeping, for a long-range shuttle he was uncertain would be returned in one piece. If he could aid in preventing a coming apocalypse, he looked forward to the disappointment and long lecture he would undoubtedly receive.

He had time for a quick shower before surrendering to the inevitable. 

**Author's Note:**

> muteku (grain in the palm) -similar to falafel  
> buhnthas (milk coins) - similar to soup dumplings but with hot, spicy nut-milk.  
> (yes, I totally made these up)  
> pas-kae - dull mind, not the sharpest tool in the toolbox.  
> t'traih-ve - the concept of infinity diversity in infinite combination as a lived philosophy.
> 
> Spock indulges in all the naughty things, including touching his food with his hands. 
> 
> If you enjoy this story feel free to give me hearts.


End file.
